New MRI facility supports imaging for research and education

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is “one of the workhorses in basic research on the human brain in psychology and neuroscience,” says Joseph Kable, the Jean-Marie Kneeley President’s Distinguished Professor of Psychology. “It originated as a clinical test but because of functional neuroimaging, it’s now one of the basic tools that many people who study human behavior—and the relationship between human behavior and the human brain—use.”

Kable is the faculty director of MindCORE, Penn’s hub for the integrative study of the mind, which he says saw a need for a facility dedicated not for clinical use, but for research and educating the next generation of scientists. ‘CORE,’ after all, stands for the Center for Outreach, Research, and Education.

The School of Arts & Sciences has established the new MindCORE Neuroimaging Facility at the Pennovation Works site. Giving a tour of the new 3,200-square-foot space, facility Director Brock Kirwan showed how the area is much more than the MRI scanner.

One room has a Murphy bed that researchers can use for sleep and electroencephalogram studies, along with a colorful fabric play tunnel where children can be still and pretend that they’re in a scanner, though Kirwan said MindCORE will be getting a mock MRI scanner to prepare kids for the experience. The facility also includes three behavioral testing rooms, participant changing rooms, a conference room, and office space.

Kirwan, who has a background in memory research and was a psychology professor at Brigham Young University before coming to Penn, says a group like his could start out doing a memory activity in one of the testing rooms before using the scanner.

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The facility is the first site in the United States to use the Food and Drug Administration-approved version of the Siemens MAGNETOM Cima.X 3 Tesla MRI scanner, Kirwan says. The scanner’s gradient coil technology means users can scan at higher resolutions and do more precise analyses. Kable says his particular hope for this machine is looking at the connections of white matter—networks of nerve fibers—in different areas of the brain. He likens the limitations of previously available technology to knowing that cars are going in and out of an intersection but not being able to follow their trajectory.

The idea for the MindCORE Neuroimaging Facility had been in the works since before the COVID pandemic. Now, following the complex installation of the scanner in April and Kirwan coming onboard in May, the machine is ready for primetime.

The first group to collect data there is The Changing Brain lab headed by Allyson Mackey, associate professor of psychology. Mackey explains that she is working on a study looking at how much the brain can change in response to early childhood experiences. She is partnering with the social services organization ParentChild+, which has a program in which underserved families receive 92 home visits and acquire books and educational toys, and working with Philadelphia families.

Mackey explains that the 200 kids enrolled in her study are randomly assigned to go through this program or through a nutrition-oriented program that gives parents healthy recipes and gift cards for groceries. The intervention began between the ages of 1 ½ and 3, but she waits until children are 4 to invite them in for imaging, because that’s when they can be more still in the scanner. Several children have used the new scanner.

“At Pennovation, families can drive right up and park right there, and the whole building is light and filled with sunshine. A lot of centers are not; they’re usually in the basement,” Mackey says. “MindCORE has worked really hard to make this a welcoming environment for families from many different kinds of backgrounds.”

In terms of research-dedicated scanners, the Perelman School of Medicine has five research MRI systems: two at the University and three within the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. But Mackey says parking is challenging for the families she works with, while Kirwan notes that researchers—faculty as well as graduate students who need dissertation data—are competing for time on scanners with more clinically oriented research studies.

Mackey says the new MindCORE facility will foster collaboration. “It’s a place to build community, to share ideas and tools and methods, and to work together in psychology and the broader MindCORE community.” It will also help attract top faculty, Mackey notes, “because being able to scan at a facility with great technology, great support, great community, and great availability makes cognitive neuroscience just so much more possible.”

Kable says his research group has gone to the facility to test different imaging protocols, and they’re getting ready to start collecting data. He has a few ongoing projects that use functional MRI (fMRI), imaging that specifically measures brain activity, including one testing the hypothesis that networks in the brain are different in people who are more empathetic and altruistic. Kable is also interested in the brain networks involved in delayed gratification.

Other researchers who have a research question and Institutional Review Board approval can schedule use of the scanner and pay by the hour.

On the education side, Kirwan will teach an introduction to fMRI research course in the spring semester for third- and fourth-year undergraduate students. Students will download and analyze publicly available data sets, and then they will collect their own MRI scan data and do an analysis.

The top option Kirwan presents to students, one he uses as a demo, is a psychophysics experiment in which participants look at a flickering checkerboard and listen to music. “I love that one, because they’re for sure going to get something,” he says. “If their subjects can see the stimulus, then the occipital lobe is going to respond to the stimulus.” But Kirwan says if students are interested in something else, they could try that, such as a memory recognition or a language task.

As for the “O” in MindCORE: Kable says the scanner will be included in the outreach tours that MindCORE leads for high school students at Pennovation, which show them how fields such as computer science and animal research fit into cognitive science.